“It will also have an extremely ambitious goal: to assess,
assemble, explain and promote the complex and evolving web of
standards that will be needed to make the vision of a Smart Grid in
the United States a reality. It will also mark the end of the first
chapter in a journey that began with the passage of the Energy
Independence and Security Act of 2007.“What is a Smart Grid, compared to what we have now? Today, we
have centralized production of electricity, with distribution of
that power being handled by somewhat interconnected, regional
networks to commercial and home users. We also have burgeoning
green house gas emissions, growing dependence on foreign oil, both
as a result of our need to keep increasing our generating capacity
in order to meet whatever the peak national electrical need may
be.“With a Smart Grid, the production, storage and use of
electricity will be interactive, with millions of home and business
owned wind and solar power generating nodes, as well as millions of
highly distributed battery storage resources – in the form of
millions of electric, and electric/hybrid cars parked in home
garages. When you add all that together, you have a massive,
load-leveling pool of energy producers and consumers, rather than
just a one way distribution street.”